Today’s journey starts nearly two years ago when I read an article in the Wall St. Journal about historical board gaming. At the time I owned none of those games. Since then I have made a pair of purchases. After buying 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis based on the discussion, I wrote a bit about it and particularly the derivation from Twilight Struggle‘s design. I dwelt on the similarities and differences between 13 Days and Twilight Struggle from both a gameplay standpoint and a design standpoint. That obvious connection between the two irked some folks on the discussion boards – they felt that 13 Days was a little too derivative and that perhaps there was some impropriety in “borrowing” from the Twilight Struggle theme without due deference to the original designers.

Meanwhile, there was a particular name whose heavy influence these titles I had also been discussing; that of designer Mark Herman. He designed Fire in the Lake as well as having a deeper historical connection to its development. His creation of We The People in 1993 is often cited as the origination of the Card Driven (War)Game (CDG) as a genre. That ties him, at least spiritually, to Twilight Struggle (and, therefore 13 Minutes via 13 Days), Freedom: The Underground Railroad, and 1960: The Making of the President. Throw in my spurious connection between Richards Berg and Borg, and we’ve drawn a line between Herman and Memoire ’44 as well.

You see, it was Mark Herman that took back* the Twilight Struggle baton from 13 Days.

In his “Designer Notes” Herman writes how he had an interest in smaller games in the late 1970s, but various pressures had shifted his focus to the big games. Without mentioning 13 Days by name, he indicates that its use of his own (We The People) mechanics and the Twilight Struggle theme motivated him to get back into small, quick games using the CDG mechanic. He thought of his follow-on to We The People, the Civil War themed For The People, and how it neglected to model the run-up to the firing on Fort Sumter. The result was a 20 minute game, Fort Sumter: The Secession Crisis, 1860-61, intended to the first in a series of smaller games.

Elsewhere, Herman makes a comparison relative to theme with Twilight Struggle. Specifically, he is saying that “games on this period have an advantage” when it comes the inclusion of history in that the players have, themselves, lived through some or all of the events depicted in the game. To me, this seems another reference to 13 Days. Because, you see, the two games are structured very much alike. The both games consist of three hands, where all but one of the cards are played – either for the “event” printed on them or a (usually lesser, but more flexible) number value. The last card of each hand is then saved for an “aftermath.” There are differences between the two games, of course, and some of those differences, while minor in and of themselves, make for a significantly different feel in terms of game play as well as in terms of the theme.

Open move. Fredrick Douglas influences the New York City papers, but its a bluff.

Both 13 Days and Fort Sumter start with each player secretly choosing an objective (from a random 3 in 13 Days and a random 2 in Fort Sumter). The big difference is that in 13 Days, you know which three cards your opponent has and vice versa. In Fort Sumter, you have no idea except to say it is not the same two choices you have (or, in later rounds, those that have already been played). Furthermore, Fort Sumter has more spaces to choose from – four trios of “dimensions” instead of just three. At the same time, you only get four cards (three playable) instead of 13 Days‘ five. The end result for all of this is that in 13 Days, the key element is bluffing. You already have enough information about your opponents choice that you might be able guess what objective the other player has, by watching his play. If you are correct, that could translate to a decisive advantage in scoring. In Fort Sumter, on the other hand, you mostly have to concentrate on your own goals. There is some opportunity to counter the moves of your opponent but, for the most part, you neither have the knowledge nor the opportunity to do so.

Critically, this makes 13 Days much less feasible as a computer game. I talked a little in my previous article about how a 13 Days “AI” might be structured. Most of your decisions revolve around how your opponent is going to perceive your moves and how much you react to (or ignore) your opponent. This has a decidedly psychological angle. Decision-making in Fort Sumter, in contrast, will be much more focuses on the player’s own goals. Automating that decision-making is aided by the relative simplicity of the game. Perhaps its not so surprising then that, approximately a year after the board game was released, a computer version also became available.

Fort Sumter‘s digital version was developed and published by Playdek, the same development house responsible for the well-received Twilight Struggleconversion. Several years later, Playdek and GMT (publisher of the physical Twilight Struggle) announced a partnership for the development of multiple games from the GMT catalogue. Specific projects in the announcement included a computer conversion of Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001-?; a yet-to-be-published title, Imperial Struggle; and unnamed games from the COIN series. The first two are reworking of the Twilight Struggle game structure to model the post- 9-11 world and the English-French rivalry leading up to the American Revolution. The COIN games, I have opined, trace their lineage from Twilight Struggle, through Labyrinth, and into that ever-expanding COIN series. You can easily see the appeal of extending the Twilight Struggle (computer game) engine into a portfolio of games. Lots of releases from a core of common code.

At the time of the announcement, the first product of this partnership was going to be Labyrinth, albeit without a target release date. To date, I’ve not seen updates on Labyrinth‘s but, in the interim, we’ve had last year’s release of Fort Sumter. Given the lineage between GMT, Twilight Struggle, through to Fort Sumter, clearly this seems like a positive (if small) step in that “generic engine” direction.

I do not have the Fort Sumter board game and so I have no experience playing the game against any opponent other than the Playdek AI**. Overall, it seems like a simpler game when compared to 13 Days. I’ve gone into some of that simplification above. Another key component, present in both games, is the idea of a escalating crisis. Fort Sumter‘s version of DEFCON is considerably simpler. Rather than actions indirectly or directly increasing tension, the equivalent consists simply of the blocks that have yet to be put in play. The combination of simplified features makes the game feel that much shallower.

For the last regular round, I hope that a double-value of Fort Sumter will keep me in the lead.

The one area where there is a little bit more to the game, relative to 13 Days, is the “Final Crisis,” or what 13 Days calls the Aftermath. Recall how I discussed that the 13 Days Aftermath is a similar mechanic to the Space Race in Twilight Struggle. You can either put cards in the Aftermath to gain points for an end-of-game scoring opportunity (+2 VP to the side with the most points), or you can dump cards into the Aftermath to avoid having them played during the regular game. The problem is, “spacing” opponents cards in this manner adds to their point total in the Aftermath.

Fort Sumter avoids this dilemma by having two separate card functions, depending upon when the card is played. The event, including to which side it belongs, and the play-value of the card are all irrelevant in the Final Crisis resolution. All the matters is its color. Thus, while the “aftermath” is still a good way to get rid of cards from your hand that you don’t want to play – there is just no downside to doing so. This simplification is balanced by the fact that the “Final Crisis” play itself is active. Each player secretly sorts their hand, and then with the order so determined, plays their held cards one at a time. Each play entitles the player to move or remove up to two cubes targeting the “dimension” indicated on the card. If, however, both players target the same dimension in the same round, they both must remove their own tokens. This takes most of the strategy away from cards themselves and makes it (almost) a straight-up cube placement mechanic. Given the number of strategy cards, there is no way to predict what your opponent might have and so the chance of a match is almost entirely random.

Fort Sumter relates to the start of the Civil War because it says it does. Not sure how Seward is being connected to Buchanan here, though.

So 13 Days is probably the more interesting player-versus-player game while Fort Sumter makes far more sense as a computer game, although definitely a fast-and-easy one. But what about the historical angle? When I originally looked at 13 Days, I made a distinction between that game’s integration with historical theme versus Twilight Struggle. While none of these games is meant to be either a historical or military simulation, to me, Twilight Struggle integrates the historical theme much more than the other two. On a sliding scale, however, Fort Sumter seems the most to consist of a generic mechanic with the historical stuff laid upon the top.

As with the other two, the historical background in the accompanying Playbook is a good read. I agree with Mark Herman’s comment – that part of the Struggle (tee hee) is that we are an extra 100 years removed from the present day when it comes to Fort Sumter. A yet, while enlightening, the historical background doesn’t quite imbue meaning to the game’s mechanics. For example, let’s take a look at the second (above) screenshot. My opponent, playing the rebels, has an advantage in the Fort Sumter space, which I am trying to reverse. Given that have two more cards to gain control and the AI can’t know that I want to control Sumter, it should be a given that I’m able to take it. Meanwhile, my biggest advantage is in the “Border States.” The notes explain how this dimension represents the cascading of southern States leaving the union. The pivotal “border states” rectangle represents, most importantly, Virginia and the uncertainty over which side she would support.

Fine, but what does “winning” the “Victory Point” for this mean? By controlling this space, do I prevent Virginia from seceding? Have I merely prevented Maryland from seceding, matching the historical result? Maybe I delayed Virginia’s secession without preventing it, thereby also delaying the Confederacy’s preparation for war. I think it goes without saying that, had Virginia come in militarily on the side of the Union, that would have decisively altered the course of the war. Is that reflected in game terms? While the historical chrome does make the game more interesting, it is hard to build a “story” from the course of a game in any way that makes sense.

Let’s contrast this with 13 Days.

Turkey and Berlin have no point value. Both my opponent and I have yanked our “commitment” to deescalate the risk of nuclear war.

In my previous post on the subject, I mentioned the mechanic of the “Cuban Missile Crisis” card in Twilight Struggle and how it translates into game terms a world on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. 13 Days is far more abstract, but I can still build a story from it. Let’s take the screenshot above, similarly taken from a game nearing its end. Playing as Kennedy, I can see that Khrushchev is being pushed politically to escalate the nuclear threat. If I am too soft, he’ll win political points (either at home or abroad, I don’t know which one he’s pushing for) that will disadvantage the U.S. in the Cold War for years to come. On the other hand, if I push too hard to counter him, the war could go hot and one of us loses, consumed in fire. Meanwhile, I’m bluffing. I’m signalling that my biggest concern is the politics of protecting Italy, but that’s not true. I’m trying to score political points over Cuba and augment that with a strong military stance using the U.S. fleet in the Atlantic. Since I started this round on the brink of nuclear war, I had to drop support for missiles in Turkey as well as leave Berlin hanging in the wind, militarily, to back the world away from that nuclear button. The game is abstract, yes, but the theme allows you to make it historical if you so desire.

As of that above screenshot, if the game played out as I expected it would, there was no way to know who was going to win. I get to go last, so I aim to pick up a couple of points in my objective after the Soviets can no longer counter me. This might put me up a point or maybe two, but that won’t matter, because ties go to the Soviets. I also had to give up my advantage at the United Nations in order to back away from the edge and that means the “Personal Letter” will be taken by Khrushchev for the game’s end. Who wins will all come down to the aftermath, and I don’t feel confident in that arena. Throughout the crisis, I have been struggling with my supposed ally’s in the free world while the Soviets have been strengthening their own relationships. The result of controlling the “Alliances” block, in game terms, is three more aftermath cards in the kitty than I will have. In story terms, a “stalemate” in terms of the crisis itself will favor the Communists in the long run, as they were all along thinking of the long term effects on their alliances.

Kaboom!

Unfortunately for the Soviet Union, and the mass casualties that resulted from the nuclear exchange, Khrushchev miscalculated. Instead of doing what I expected, he used the card “Guns of August” to push the world to the brink of war on the “World Opinion” track. I can’t connect the book Guns of August to my story except to say, as Germany miscalculated the ability to contain the Diplomatic fallout from backing Serbia, so did alt-world Khrushchev miscalculate how much he could use pressure the rest of the world to force Kennedy to back away from the brink.

Obviously, the Soviets had gotten used to their influence over the sympathetic liberal reporters in the Western press and counted on that control to manipulate Kennedy into a position such that if a war started, everything would look like America’s fault. He didn’t count on the fact that, even though many reporters had political differences with the Administration and the military, when it came down to it they were still Americans and still Patriots. Khrushchev found he could not manipulate the press and when he pushed the world into war, he was forced to take the blame for the resulting loss of life among his own people.

As information about the situation in 1962 has become declassified, it lends support to the position of hawks like LeMay; a massive first strike by the U.S. may have crippled the Soviet Union sufficiently that they would be unable to mount a successful retaliation and would therefore be unwilling to retaliate at all. Nuking the Soviet Union, particularly if it was widely deemed that Kennedy had been forced into the decision, might have resulted in a U.S. “win.” At least that’s how I interpret the above result, where the Soviets have clearly won on points but, in doing so, triggered a nuclear war. Such a detailed analysis is more than a little silly – few of my details were really part of the game. My point, however, is that 13 Days lends itself to undertaking such an exercise in ways that I don’t believe Fort Sumter is capable.

I spoke before about this idea that you win, both in Twilight Struggle and in 13 Days, if you can make war look like the other guy’s fault. Fort Sumter lacks even the clarity of this iffy mechanic. What does it mean to end the game with more points? Can war be avoided? Is, with Lincoln having been elected, the Civil War inevitable even as you are trying to influence whom the history books blame it upon? Perhaps there is an implication that a better run-up to Bull Run might have resulted in a Confederate military victory. Could holding Fort Pickens as well as taking Sumter make a military difference? Could a more complete control over the weaponry stored in the southern Federal Arsenals have given the South an early and decisive military advantage? Maybe a few additional victories in the court of public opinion could have meant intervention by England, France, or both?

Its a tenuous historical connection – only there if you really want to make it happen. The elements may be there but I can’t get them to coalesce. Even the concept of Victory Points is deliberately vague. What does it mean to accumulate said points in terms of the outcome of the war? Herman says, in the design notes, that he struggled with this. He suggests that a top contender for what the points represent was “Strategic Will,” a phrase that still doesn’t help me understand much. In the end, he felt that leaning toward the abstract would prevent confusion for players and make it a better game.

How do you win? You get more Victory Points. Anybody can understand that.

Last of all, I’ll say that for whatever its faults, there are reasons Fort Sumter may still be a must buy. Translated to the computer, it becomes a game that can be completed in about 10 minutes. As such, it may fill a gaming need for something quick yet cerebral. It also, if you catch it on sale, can be had for under $2. Even at full price, it is under $5. Hard not to surrender to temptation.

*Some restructuring removed a link I previously had to a Wargamer.com review. So that the link doesn’t disappear, I included a link to the board game and the PC game. Oddly enough, given that the reviews were written by the same author, the board game review seems positive while the PC game review is negative. In particular, the historical theme is credited in the first but deemed a shortfall in the second. I will discuss this aspect further.

**I don’t know if anyone is reading through all my meandering writing seeking a critical review of the game. Just in case you’ve persevered thus far, I’ll throw out this bone. The AI seems weak, even against an fairly new player. I’ve only lost game in the handful or two I’ve played, and that involved a pretty stupid move on my part. On the other hand, in my last game, I saw a really dumb move from the AI. I had played the event that allows an early play of the “Peace Commissioners.” Essentially, this freezes the state of one space on the board through to the “Final Crisis” phase. I played it on Washington, the pivotal space for the political dimension when that had no units from either side on it. It essentially made it very difficult to earn any points from a political objective and all-but-impossible to earn the Washington points. My thinking was that there was a 1-in-4 chance that, at the time of play, the AI had a political objective and therefore I had a 25% shot at denying him that one point. The next round, the AI chose Washington as his objective, knowing that I already had it blocked. Rough-order-of-magnitude thinking, that a 90%+ chance that he will be unable to get that point. It’s just throwing away a point for nothing and, as it turns out, that single point made a difference. Again, that’s a lot of words but, I’m thinking that if the AI can’t see what it a near-certain implication of a card play, I have to wonder if it is really all that sophisticated.

First, however, to get into the mood, I found the book Back Channel by Stephen L. Carter. (For what it’s worth, the hard cover is considerably cheaper than the paperback and actual 30 cents less than the e-book right now). This is a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis, fictionalizing the details of the secret deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev that staved off a shooting war.

As I was trying to decide whether or not to read this book, I was put off by the marketing pitch. Without naming my source, I’ll just say that I got the recommendation for this title from a list which seems to have a considerable political bias. While the books listed should be for a general readership, I notice an emphasis toward progressive-leaning books (and, oddly, Romance Novels) while deemphasizing the kind of books in which I’d actually be interested. Before jumping on board, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being sold a pig in a poke.

Some further searching only confirmed my initials concerns. Blurbs for Back Channel mentioned how Carter was the recipient of awards from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the NAACP. Reviewers on Amazon praised the book for its insights about black America. Now that may be all well and good, but what I want to read right now is a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis (involving black characters is fine), not a book about being African-American in American in 1962. It turns out my suspicions were misplaced. From all the misdirection, I can only assume that there is a segment of the reading public (a bigger segment than that to which I belong) that would prefer the latter to the former.

Carter is a Law Professor at Yale and, from what I can tell from his bio and from reading Back Channel, has no obvious dedication to one side or the other of our current political wars. Back Channel is the seventh novel that he’s written and he seems to specialize in historical fiction associated with government and politics, in particular included significant historical figures. Right from the beginning, we are introduced to the story with President Kennedy himself involved in a secret meeting with the (fictional) teen-aged main character of the novel.

The mixing of the historical, the plausible, and the fictional is very well done, making it difficult to know where one ends and the other picks up (although, at the end of the book, the author tries to explain where the boundaries lie). The combination of real history, historic drama, and spy thriller works well. So well that I’ve added some of his other works to my list of books to read.

Also, to my amusement as I read through, I keep encountering the Strategy Cards from 13 Days. It’s an interesting reflection from the chrome of the game. Not only that, I’ve started to see words, phrases, and themes from the book popping up in the news (North Korean summit) and in fiction (The Expanse).

Twilight Tussle

With even just a glance at the game, there can be little doubt that this design is based on Twilight Struggle. The board looks like a reduced version of Twilight Struggle‘s global map and the timeframe is compressed from decades into the titular 13 days. Even where components do not translate from Twilight Struggle into 13 Days, the functions are similar. For example, China does not play a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, the China Card mechanic from Twilight Struggle is very similar to the Personal Letter card mechanic in 13 Days.

One of the twists of 13 Days is that there is are two separate decks of cards. The Strategy Cards in 13 Days correspond to the deck in Twilight Struggle. Each card has an operational value (command, in the 13 Days lingo) and an event, which is usable by one side, the other, or both. 13 Days has a second deck. This deck is played in a separate phase. In many ways, these cards are analogous to the scoring cards in Twilight Struggle, but the use is simplified. At the beginning of each round, each player is dealt three cards from the Agenda deck and chooses one. These two cards are now the map locations that will be scored that turn, but each player only knows the identity of the one they, themselves, have selected. Similarly to the way cards are restricted in Twilight Struggle (in that game, by early/middle/late war designation) though, each player is informed as to the three cards the other player was dealt, so they can make educated guesses about what their opponent’s agenda might be.

Within the strategy phase, play is similar to Twilight Struggle, but simpler. Players take turns playing one card from their (hidden) hand, each playing all but one. In 13 Days, the last card in your hand is placed in an Aftermath pile, which is analogous to the Space Race mechanic of Twilight Struggle. The four active cards can be played for points or, if the event is neutral or your own, for the event action. Like Twilight Struggle, if the card you play for points is an enemy event, the enemy gets to play that event (in this case, the enemy always plays their event before you play your points).

So the game is compressed in scope and scale, and that simplicity is reflected in the game play itself. The box says it is a 45 minute game (as opposed to several hours for Twilight Struggle) and, as I said in the previous article, many players say it is more like a 30 minute game once you learn the rules. As one review points out, the game consists of twelve cards played per side and that is it.

Several on-line reviewers agreed that 13 Days lacks the “bite” of Twilight Struggle, without going into detail as to what they meant by that. Based on my initial experience, I would say this. 13 Days does not have the the kind of complex traps that one player can set for another. In Twilight Struggle this may be exemplified by the “DEFCON suicide card,” where you win by forcing the enemy to allow a game ending move on their turn. 13 Days does not allow the game to end prematurely, except in the 3 scoring phases at the end of the round. There is no surprise event that a player can produce that would result an immediate victory. Furthermore, the events are less complex. As far as I can tell, they are mostly slight trade-ups from the operational value of the cards themselves. You get to do just a little more, but may be limited in where you can do it. Also, as far as I can tell, 13 Days doesn’t have the opportunity for a complex series of card plays to achieve a multiplier effect. In Twilight Struggle, playing card X as a headline can be very valuable if you can follow up with card Y and maybe card Z. I’ve yet to see a clear “one-two punch” in the 13 Days cards.

In addition, the design of 13 Days is far more a “game” with Cuban Missile Crisis accoutrements, versus a game that simulates the Cuban Missile Crisis – even in comparison with the design of Twilight Struggle. I talked before about how the designer explained that Twilight Struggle is not meant to be a simulation – it is first and foremost a game. Nevertheless, the mechanics are very much tied to the the historical situations and outcomes that they portray. Take, for example, Cuban Missile Crisis event in Twilight Struggle. Until deescalated, the game is put on the edge of a nuclear-war-induced end. It may not be a simulation of the Cuban Missile Crisis in any meaningful way, but it clear that the event represents the situation that occurred in 1962.

Contrast that with almost any event in 13 Days. It takes quite a bit more imagination to see the events described as “simulated” by the adding an removing of influence blocks. Yes, playing the game may put you in the mood to think about what happened and what might have happened surrounding Cuba, but the game in no way allows one to explore those what-ifs. I would imagine that any number of settings could have worked just as well for playing similar cards and placing blocks. Practically speaking, the purpose of the setting may be to focus the minds of the players, allowing them to mentally sort the card events. As to portraying the conflict itself? Probably not.

All that said, the opinions from players of 13 Days are generally positive. On Board Game Geek, it currently has a rating of 7.6. This isn’t Twilight Struggle‘s 8.3, but it ranks it among the better games, especially if you are looking in the war/historical genre. While simple, the interactions are complex enough to keep it interesting. The simplicity has another advantage. The game, even at full price, runs half or less of what most “serious” board games go for.

The game also removes the dice that are a key factor in Twilight Struggle. Randomness is only through the shuffles of the two decks. Nobody can predict what cards they will be dealt nor the 5-10 cards that may remain unused at the end of the game. This means that the key differentiator between players is the knowledge that each player has about their own cards. What cards they have in hand that have yet to be played and which card has been selected as the agenda for that round. In this way, the key competitive factor in the game is the bluffing involved in making one’s moves. Did that play I just made tip off what agenda I selected? Or am I deliberately trying to make it look like I have one particular agenda, when it is really something else?

One funny aside I noticed about my own gameplay, when I was doing a solitaire run-through of the tutorial. When I set out blocks, I tend to like them in symmetrical patterns. The fully-influenced battlefield would either have a square, such as the typical five-side on a die, or be in a pentagonal arrangement. However, if I know I have no intention of completing the full five, I don’t start making one of my two “five” patterns. Instead, I’m apt to make a triangle or diagonal shape suited to the total number I intend to eventually leave there. If I did that in a real game, I’d be telegraphing my moves.

I’ll Have Us a War with Those Sons of Bitches and I’ll Make it Look Like Their Fault!

Going back to those DEFCON suicide cards, there is something I wrote about a little bit in my Twilight Struggle article and its philosophy on a nuclear end-game. In this respect, 13 Days sees and raises Twilight Struggle‘s treatment of nuclear war. Twilight Struggle uses the concept of a single DEFCON track to represent how close the world is coming to nuclear war. The concept has been adopted and reused in other games so that for a game player, DEFCON is apt to associate with its Twilight Struggle meaning rather than its historical meaning. DEFCON was, of course, an internal indication of the US military alert level, meaning that the Soviets would have had an equivalent but (not necessarily) equal level. Furthermore, DEFCON 1, rather than being the onset of a nuclear attack, was merely the maximum alert status in preparation for an imminent nuclear war. While the U.S. has never entered DEFCON 1, it is not a forgone conclusion that doing so would mean a missile launch.

The other meaning of DEFCON, championed by Twilight Struggle, is that entering a “hot” war meant a loss. As my previous article discussed, the Twilight Struggle designers credited Balance of Power with the inspiration for this mechanic. I also discussed, though,the curious feature of this in that if you can force the other player to start that war, you don’t lose – you win.

13 Days elaborates on this. Rather than a single DEFCON, there are separate tracks for each side. Furthermore, each side has three different categories (Military, Political, and World Opinion) for which DEFCON is tracked separately. Clearly DEFCON doesn’t mean the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s military readiness rating. Unlike Twilight Struggle, entering DEFCON 1 is not an instant loss. The effect of DEFCON doesn’t occur until the scoring phase at the end of each round. Then, and only then, if you have any one of your three tracks in DEFCON 1, you lose. Furthermore, if you have all three of your DEFCON tracks in DEFCON 2 or higher, you lose.

This serves to model the real “game” during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Neither side wanted a full-on nuclear war. So the question was how to avoid that fate while still maximizing your own side’s position.

However, the flip side of the DEFCON mechanic in 13 Days is that, if you can somehow force your opponent into a DEFCON loss, you win. In other words, launching nuclear Armageddon is fine and dandy as long as you can plausibly blame the other side for starting it. This is even more so than Twilight Struggle, where I speculated about the meaning of forcing a DEFCON suicide on your opponent. In 13 Days, it clearly means starting a war – a war whose outcome probably won’t vary all that much depending on who started it.

Oddly enough, Back Channel actually addresses the subject, although from a slightly different angle. Considering the importance of plausible deniability if the black operation goes wrong, the National Security Advisor explains realpolitik to Bobby Kennedy,

‘If it goes wrong,’ said Bobby, ‘nobody will care about who’s to blame.’

I’m not sure it really answers the question, but the book is full of indications that “who started it” is a major consideration for many, if not most, of those involved.

Particularly when I consider this game in concert with a detailed narrative like Back Channel, I tend to interpret all the Strategy Card events as political maneuvering. Placing military blocks is less about actual military action than about appeasing or displeasing certain “hawk” factions within your own government. Most events can be interpreted as internal maneuvers or (e.g. U-2 Downed) an actual escalating event that may either be controlled through other actions or spiral out of control. But the abstractness of the game leaves that, I suppose, as an exercise for each player. Does the “Invasion of Cuba” U.S. event imply an invasion of Cuba, or is it merely Kennedy’s readiness and willingness to exercise it as an option? That is, is Cuba only invaded if card play results in a DEFCON loss?

Opposition Research

Having spent some time (and, to date, not finishing) a computer opponent for Twilight Struggle, I figured it wouldn’t be a huge thing to adapt that computer opponent for 13 Days. Naturally, it has been more of a project than I expected, but it was in fact adaptable.

To date, I have a programmed opponent that can play the tutorial scenario, as printed in the manual, from either side. With only a little bit of fudging, it will make all the same decisions as outlined in the explanatory text, with one exception. I’ll get to that in the next section.

It was actually surprisingly to me how easy it was to reproduce the tutorial’s logic. Most of the logic goes through a pair of algorithms that rank the choice of what card to play and the choice of what battleground (in the 13 Days sense, not the Twilight Struggle sense) to play it on. More surprisingly, I found that the tutorial does not have any dynamic dependency in the decision making.

I’ll explain. The logic that I use looks only at the current state. Going into this exercise, I assumed that it would be necessary to react to enemy placements, altering one’s best guess as to what the enemy agenda is. And while the tutorial text hints at just such a bit of figuring, it turns out that it doesn’t really change the selection over what to play next as compared to static logic. To put it another way, the fact that I just added two blocks to a space doesn’t make contesting that space particularly more appealing than if those blocks had already been there from earlier.

Now, I have no doubt that superior play comes from analyzing combinations of moves and creating plans which are carried out over multiple moves. But at the tutorial level, that isn’t really what’s happening. Similarly, I have a theory based on limited play that the order that cards are played in, in contrast to Twilight Struggle, doesn’t have a big impact on outcome. The biggest reason to chose cards in a particular order is more about what information might be tipped off to the other player as opposed to optimizing card combination. Again, an experience player may know otherwise.

Logic and Argument

I’ll indulge myself by going into the details of a couple of moves as the tutorial plays them. If you don’t play the game, it probably won’t make any sense at all. The rules, which includes the sample play-through, are available on-line, so anyone is free to follow along. If you’d rather not, skip to the next header.

So, as I said, the AI program I adapted is good enough to reproduce the tutorial game from both sides, with two exceptions. There are two moves that the computer considers downright dumb and there is no way I can get it to make them (absent just randomly picking from legal moves). I have to say I agree with the machine here.

The first of the two is a Soviet move, and it comes in the first round of the game. I believe it is meant to illustrate the value of misdirection when playing.

In selecting the Agenda card, the narrative explains how the U.S. is lucky with the draw and chooses Italy as the easiest path. Italy is worth the most points and the setup has the U.S. one-up in Italian influence. The playthrough has the U.S. making several moves to “misdirect” the Soviets. The problem is, the Soviet has all the same information that the U.S. player has. He too knows the U.S. drew the Italy card and can see the advantages of using it. Nevertheless, the tutorial suggests that the Soviets do not believe that Italy is the agenda – could happen. Several times during the round, the Soviet player forgoes the option of taking control of Italy – which is OK, given the premise.

The problem comes with the last card played in the round. The Soviet uses the event “Intelligence Reports,” allowing him to take an American card (at this point, the only one he has). The pilfered card, “Suez-Hungary,” allows the Soviets to take control of Italy with very little downside. However many cubes are required to take control are played by the event at no DEFCON escalation cost. Furthermore, as the last card of the round, if it happens to be the right move, there is no opportunity for the U.S. to counter it. The only downside is that each player can only have a maximum of 17 cubes in play on the board. Adding two more cubes now means either having to “waste” a card in a later round to remove those cubes or perhaps having to forego the placement of cubes in a future round because you have run out. To me, unless you are 100% sure that Italy is not the U.S. agenda, taking Italy now with 2 cubes is an obvious play. And of course, there is no way to be 100% sure.

Allowing the AI to play this card as it would like would substantially alter the remainder of the game, so to complete the tutorial requires skipping the event. Furthermore, there is no way that I could figure to reprogram the AI to decide to skip the card, at least not in a way that made sense. (Logically, I could have the AI make a guess as to which agenda the opponent picked and bet everything on that guess, but I don’t think I want to do that).

The other mistake is more obviously wrong, although in the context of the tutorial it doesn’t change the end result. The U.S. holds an event card, “Eyeball to Eyeball.” For operations purpose it is worth one cube, but if the U.S. has the lead in Military DEFCON (which he does), three cubes can be spread over the two Cubas. Escalation still applies, however, so placing more than one has its downside. With this in mind, the player uses the event to place just a single cube in the Cuba Military. It is one of the U.S. agenda cards, but not the one selected. The tutorial notes explain that this deception causes the Soviet player to make what seems (particularly in retrospect) like a bad counter move.

Notice, however, that if the event is used to place just a single cube, the command operation value of the card can also place that single cube. So if the card is to be used, it could be used either way with the same result. However, if you’re going to use the card for its operational value only, then it doesn’t matter whether you are using a U.S. event or a neutral event. So it is absolutely foolish to play a U.S. event for its command value and then place a neutral event in the aftermath when you can do the opposite for no change except to pick up (in this case a single point, but in general) points at the end-of-game scoring. As I said, in the tutorial the Soviets are far enough ahead in the aftermath victory point tally that it makes no difference. But in principle, it is entirely the wrong move.

I dwell on this here because, as a player following along with the tutorial, it was not obvious. When trying to get an AI to make the same “mistake,” however, it became impossible and therefore clear that making the “wrong” move should never be selected algorithmically.

Eyeball to Eyeball

While I now have a copy of the game to play with, finding opponents is a little harder.

To the rescue comes a website created by Alexander Rymasheusky. With permission of 13 Days‘s creators, he has made a browser-based online version of the game.

I open with a heavy hand in Cuba and wait to see how my opponent responds.

It’s really an impressive system. I’m even more impressed having struggled through programming an opponent for the game myself. The program provides a gaming lobby with chat and the ability to create new games or join an already created one. For games that have two players signed on, you can follow on as an observer.

During play, and this is the impressive part, the program enforces all of the rules. As a result, there are no concerns about cheating (or, more likely, just misinterpreting the rules). One can just follow the prompts. Given the way each event can be interpreted as an exception or special case to the rules, this is a pretty deep feature for a free, web game. In fact, I would venture to guess that the combination of a decent UI and rules enforcement may be more than half-way there, if you are talking about programming a full single player mode. Restricting the programmed opponent to playing only legal moves is at least as important to trying to get him to play good moves.

I’ll Return Before the Fire Dies

I was pleasantly surprised to find some good, high-level treatments of the Cuban Missile Crisis in historical fiction and in gaming. As critical as the event was as a piece of history, it doesn’t fit into the mold of your typical wargame. But a little bit of innovation and some stretching of the imagination, and look what we’ve got!

Next up, however, I’ll come at it from the other way. Traditional wargames can explore potential what-ifs. Namely, what if the Cuban Missile Crisis turned the cold war hot.

In an “I never thought I’d see the day” moment, the Wall St. Journal this weekend has an article on the historical genre of board gaming. It’s more of a side bar format, really, than an article. After a brief orientation about how Settlers of Catan is a better experience for adults than Candyland, they recommend five strategy games based on historical events. In the original order:

1. 13 Minutes,

2. Freedom: The Underground Railroad,

3. Memoire ’44,

4. 1960: The Making of the President, and

5. Fire in the Lake.

The article features a nice picture of the Freedom board, set up for play. (I can’t see any of this on line – you may need to have the printed Wall St. Journal to see it at all). What drew my interest most is the first title on the list. I’ve seen all the others at some point or the other, but their #1 was new to me.

On Amazon, 13 Minutes is sold for (at present) $10 and is also suggested as a three game package, together with 13 Days:The Cuban Missile Crisis (this I’ve glanced at before) and a game called Twilight Squabble. Together, the trio offer ways to play Cold War in very short game play. 13 Minutes is described as the time it would take missiles to reach the U.S. from Cuba, and also the typical length of a game. 13 Days is described as a 45 minute game, but online reviews discuss whether it can be finished in 30 minutes. Twilight Squabble offers the entire Cold War in 10 minutes.

While the third may be overdoing it a little, the firsttwo receive fairly good marks on Board Game Geek. In fact, not at all obvious to me until I began reading, the two games are made by the same designers. Further it would appear that the former is a deliberate condensing of the latter (although, remember, I haven’t played these games – I’m just looking at them on-line).

In addition to that bit of enlightenment, the mix of the games in the article is also interesting. First, with the exception of Memoire, the games’ pedigree all flows back to Twilight Struggle. 13 Days is obviously an attempt to streamline the Twilight Struggle gameplay, and 13 Minutes is a further streamlining of that. 1960 was another GMT release, a few years after Twilight Struggle, and (at least at first glance) looks like a variation on the theme. Fire in the Lake is one of the COIN-series games that followed on from Labyrinth, itself and extension of Twilight Struggle mechanics to the war on terror.

The most tenuous connection is Freedom. It is from different designers and different publishers than the children of Twilight Struggle. However, Freedom shares with Twilight Struggle the card-driven mechanics as well as the point-to-point mapboard. I’ll go so far as to say that, appearance-wise, the components resemble those of Fire in the Lake. I suspect that Freedom was also included in the list because it is a cooperative game, a novel concept to those who abandoned board gaming with one two too many games of Candyland.

Likewise, Memoire ’44 is an obvious inclusion. It predates Twilight Struggle by a year. It was not entirely a novel concept at that time. Memoire followed the Battle Cry civil war game using similar mechanics, a game system that would eventually be the Commands and Colors series. Likely the World War II theme of Memoire had a broader appeal making Memoire an entry point into the hex-and-counter wargaming genre for the non-wargaming public.

Seen this way, the list can be examples of various genres, using the American History theme to unite them. The micro-game, the cooperative game, the wargame, and a political game. The only obvious missing element is an economic game (unless the lead-in introduction to Catan counts). In this, the odd man out becomes Fire in the Lake.

Fire in the Lake has the best Board Game Geek scores of any on the list. It is also ranked as the most complex on this list. In fact, even by the standards of the COIN series (themselves something of a master-level gaming experience), Fire in the Lake is one of the more complex of the bunch. The giant leap from Candyland to Fire in the Lake would likely give Neil Armstrong pause. Maybe this game is included for readers like me. While familiar with strategy and historical boardgaming, 13 Minutes was something new for me to ponder. For others already primed for a very deep boardgame experience and interested in Cold War history, perhaps they just never realized that there was such a game as Fire in the Lake. More importantly, one might realize realize that Fire in the Lake is due up for a reprint and was discounted for pre-order.

As a final personal note, while I’ve fairly recently been playing at Candyland, I’ve never played The Settlers of Catan.